Janet Baker’s Voice, a Singular Instrument, Lingers Like No Other

Dance was not the first love of my life among the arts. Growing up in the English countryside, I lived for hours on end in books and beside the gramophone; the first performing art to obsess me was opera. When I first attended opera, at 17, it immediately proved addictive.

When asked to choose an artistic experience that I’m curious to revisit, my thoughts returned to performances by the mezzo-soprano Janet Baker. Other singers I saw in my teens were at least as superb and even more famous (Carlo Bergonzi, Boris Christoff, Tito Gobbi, Jon Vickers), but Ms. Baker was more complex, even self-contradictory. And her art took me to zones of the spirit visited by few other artists.

My mind often goes back to the at least 20 occasions on which I saw her perform — mainly but not only in opera — in music from Purcell to Walton, Donizetti to Mahler, in the years 1973-83 (the first when I was 18). I saw her play one role, Vitellia in Mozart’s “La Clemenza di Tito,” five times over three consecutive seasons in 1974-76.

By that time, Ms. Baker (born in 1933) had long been a beloved British institution. She was widely known as a model of dignity and spiritual refinement; the role of Vitellia, coming at a time when she was pushing her voice and art in new directions, was as far from her comfort zones (both temperamental and vocal) as she ever went.

Vitellia — the cruelest but most conflicted of Mozart’s women and the one confronted by the greatest dilemma — begins as a monster of ambition. Ms. Baker made much of Vitellia’s sheer nastiness and venom, her sarcasm and vanity: qualities far from the usual Baker persona. When the Roman emperor Tito doesn’t propose to Vitellia, she finds one way after another of goading her devoted suitor, Sesto, to assassinate him, though Sesto is Tito’s closest friend.

Then hubris is punished. Just when Sesto has departed to kill Tito, Vitellia receives news that Tito is, after all, inviting her to marry him and become empress. In the brilliant Act I trio “Vengo! Aspettate!,” Vitellia is poleaxed by conflicting emotion; the rushing strings alone tell us how her heart churns.

At one point, she sings the words “Io gelo! O dio! O dio!” (“I freeze! O God! O God!”), which Mozart sets as three identical, urgent, darting triplets. Most Vitellias make the whole role declamatory, melodramatically outward, even when the character is alone. But Ms. Baker took those triplets and turned them into a stunned private moment.

Singing them in a hushed pianissimo tone, with no loss of rhythm (the second note of each triplet is raised), she made them hauntingly, uncannily luminous. To this day, I have had no more piercing experience of how quiet singing can register to the uppermost seats of an opera house. The change of vocal pressure was staggering.

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Janet BakerCreditApic/Getty Images

Today, “Clemenza” is performed far more often than it was back then; I’ve seen five productions and own more than 12 recordings, but still I know of no other singer who has transformed those triplets by making them quiet, internalized, yet gleaming. This was more than eloquence; this was dramatic imagination of a rare order. I knew even then that it proved that Ms. Baker was an artist like no other.

With those triplets, Ms. Baker suddenly took us right inside the often odious Vitellia’s head. She wasn’t making conventionally theatrical sounds; she was truly reeling. This was the first turning point in her journey: the first revelation that this harsh heroine is vulnerable, that she will lack the courage to see her power scheme through.

Revisiting that production over three years and studying Mozart’s opera, I wasn’t deaf to Ms. Baker’s limitations. The role exposed both the top and the bottom of her voice. She omitted the brief top D from that trio; she sang the role’s lower notes without the forceful chest register that came naturally to other singers; and her Italian vowels lacked openness.

For me, though, the revelation of repeated viewings was to discover how, each season, Ms. Baker’s musical and physical manner changed. Vitellia isn’t the two-dimensional monster she wants to be. As the plot develops, she learns contrition. Tito survives the assassination she had planned. Sesto is arrested for having attempted it. He, honorable in dishonor, refuses to explain why he tried to kill his friend. Through most of the opera’s second and final act, Vitellia clings to the prospect of the throne, but, as others urge Tito to execute Sesto, her remorse mounts.

The drama passes through multiple cliffhangers and turning points; the most psychologically remarkable is the solo scene in which Vitellia, tormented by the loyalty of Sesto, decides to renounce Tito’s hand and declare the part she has played in ordaining the attempted assassination. Mozart sets her aria “Non più di fiori” as a rondo, in which she keeps returning sadly to the ideas of abandoning ambition and the prospect of captivity and death as the necessary punishment for her crimes.

In 1974, when the production was new, Ms. Baker was possessed of many kinds of stillness. In Act I, the way she listened balefully to Sesto (the mezzo-soprano Yvonne Minton, then at her greatest) was deadly; in Act II, the way she stood still for “Non più di fiori,” singing it in blanched, resigned tones (virtually monochrome), was supremely poignant.

Yet, in 1975, Ms. Baker drenched that same aria in a wide palette of colors while seeming racked by her own vocalism. I can’t forget how, apparently now incapable of stillness, she kept clutching her hands together and transferring weight from foot to foot — as if possessed by the need to transmit this new range of nuance. In 1976, she had changed again. Then she seemed in full physical control, but played the role — that aria, above all — with a marvelously heroic supply of period gestures, weighted and forceful, evoking Racine tragedy. (The pianissimi in the trio, however, never varied.)

Who was Janet Baker? The answer kept changing. Today, audio and video recordings of her performances still matter to young people who came along after her time; I know young musicians who revere them. What they don’t tell you is how she changed — how she kept challenging herself. Her 1976 studio recording of “Clemenza,” in fact, is fairly disappointing; CDs of a live performance from that year bring you much closer to her achievement, but part of what I revisit is the way she kept revising her own interpretation. Another part is the eerie way she made her own vocal inwardness project to the furthest reaches of the opera house.

Today, I realize that it was from opera, not dance, that I first learned about the eloquence of movement onstage, especially its timing and its weighting to music, and Ms. Baker was one of those singers who were compelling to watch. But as I look back over decades of attending theater, music and dance, I find that, for me, what lingers (and matters) more than the body’s movement or the face’s expression is the voice, whether speaking or singing. Although, in my mind’s eye, I can see again how Ms. Baker stood still or moved as Vitellia and in other roles, my mind’s ear is stronger yet.

The memory of the pianissimi in that trio has never ceased to astound me. (I can feel again where I was sitting as I first heard them in 1974, far away in the cheapest seats.) The flood of colors in her 1975 “Non più di fiori” still haunts me; in one passage, her voice sounded as if tears were running fast down her face. It still seems to me a fluke that I became a dance critic, but I already knew my life was centered on the performing arts. Janet Baker and singers like her made me sure of that; there could be no turning back.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Voice Heard Repeatedly, Lingering Like No Other. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe